Burak Tezateser

Today is a big day. We just released Good Heavens! I'm quite proud of what we have done. It took us more than 5 years to develop this and it's one of the best games of the genre. Unfortunately, not many people know about this yet. Check it out please. store.steampowered.com/app/1…

Good animations without AI used to look like this:

Working on "summoned creatures". This little fella will fight alongside our character in the game (requires a lot of investment in the tech tree and faction relations though)

This can be the best city building / colony management game ever-made. Very talented and dedicated developer.

We started coming across studies on cognitive load in games. My interest grew even more after my therapist called me an NFC (high need for cognition) person. I didn’t know this, but apparently NFC people enjoy complex thinking more than others and get intrinsic joy from the act of thinking. It all resonated with me. This explains why I like games with huge, complex tech trees and detailed UI windows where we can control everything. As a downside, I realized I wasn’t designing games for people who don’t enjoy this. I never understood the problem of “feature creep.” As long as all systems connect meaningfully, there’s no such thing as feature creep to me. Apparently, most people prefer simple, sleek designs over my ideas. I’m lucky I’m surrounded by smart people who stop me every time I go overkill 🙃

Feedback on game art is always biased. People in the comments will almost always like your art. That's because it's the first filter. The ones who consider buying your game are the ones who already liked your art.

Let's talk about dedication and motivation. There is a common advice in our industry: "start small and develop lots of small projects before starting your dream game". I thought about this a lot, maybe since the day I've started making games. This is not entirely wrong, it holds for making good games and for most people. You will learn about pipelines, development cycles, marketing... Yet, I strongly believe making great games require something else. Especially the games I like. So this is my advice for developers starting their career. If you know you can stay dedicated, if you have a dream game, don't delay your passion. Start working on that dream game and don't give up. Here are some examples you might have heard of. Stardew Valley: 5 years Kenshi: 12 years Dwarf Fortress: 20 years (for first commercial release) Caves of Qud: 5.5 years dotAge: 9 years Making system-driven games, designing, iterating, making systems to interact with each other, balancing, take a lot of times. But great games require this dedication. If you have a dream game you want to work on, but instead you make other, smaller games, you can lose your motivation quickly. For some personality types, this is hell. Know yourself, don't fall for this trap. You might ask yourself how you're going to be able to fund those long projects. I might have been lucky on that part. I am able to communicate my passion sometimes and when it works, I get funded. Because most investors/publishers are looking for dedicated people. If they see you're ready to become homeless in order to make that game alive, they know you're serious about your passion. You can't fake this. Even if you can't find some external funding, look at how these solo-devs and small teams managed to hold on. They've done all sorts of side jobs. I'm pretty sure, these games are the tip of the iceberg and many developers had to give-up at some point on their dream project. I might have been one, I'm lucky. But even I fail I would be glad I tried. Here I am, celebrating 5th year of Good Heavens! in production. The concept art I'm sharing below is from March 2021 and its the first art piece made for the game.

Hey, can I have it now? Did any of them succeed?

Let’s talk about combat in open-world survival craft games. I’ve always liked the combat systems of ARPG games like Path of Exile and Diablo. They are fun, versatile, and they have great depth. Skill trees, abilities, and weapons provide endless combinations for character builds. Yet I feel like most open-world survival craft games have somewhat dull combat. I remember playing Valheim for the first time, enjoying it a lot, but when I invited some friends to play together, they said, “meh, the combat is not for me,” and I ended up playing with other people. Most OWSC games have combat designed around high-latency play, and the combat precision and depth are very shallow. I must admit, I hadn’t seen a good combat system until Enshrouded came along. Enshrouded has different skill trees, abilities, and build variety, just like in ARPG games. Honestly, when we started working on Good Heavens! in 2021, Enshrouded wasn’t around. But it seems we had a similar approach. We have a somewhat complicated essence system. Every monster kill gives the player red essences. There are three different skill trees that red essences can be spent on (Warfare, Trickery, and Sorcery), and within those trees, there is more than a single path to follow. Abilities are bound to items in Good Heavens!, and there are four different ability slots. Weapon, chest, foot, and head items give different abilities. Combat mobility comes from foot items, and every weapon has a secondary powerful attack consuming extra stamina or mana. Chest items give defensive abilities, and head items crowd-control enemies or provide team boosts. A unique approach we’ve taken in combat comes from a unique feature in Good Heavens!: the cities. There are NPC cities from different factions, and each of these factions can have different cultures. Each faction and culture combination can give unique boosts to combat, further improving character builds.

Most people assume that procedural world-building and storytelling (not just narrative) can’t really coexist. We’ve already seen strong narrative experiences inside procedural worlds. Games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld are excellent examples of emergent narrative. However, they don’t offer authored storytelling in the way Disco Elysium or The Last of Us do. On the other hand, many procedural open-world survival/crafting games tend to skip storytelling altogether. They provide an interesting setting and fragments of narrative, but very little in terms of structured storytelling for example Valheim or Don't Starve. (They are great games though) With Good Heavens!, we’re trying to explore that gap. Our world is procedural, but it also contains a guided storyline. We solved this by dividing the experience into islands and Acts, creating natural progression points within a dynamic world. The main story includes trigger-based events, and key milestones are reinforced with cutscenes, allowing us to deliver a more structured storytelling experience without sacrificing systemic freedom. There aren’t many direct examples of this approach (at least to our knowledge). Games like Subnautica lean more on authored narrative but have limited procedurality, while Kenshi relies more heavily on emergent storytelling. So I would like to know, are there other games that attempt a similar hybrid?

I came back to X after a long time now. I am mostly interested in the gamedev scene. How is the old gamedev Twitter doing? Indie RPG and craft&build games as well as indies with good art and narrative are my area. Who to follow now? Give me recommendations!

Don't Starve Elsewhere and Graveyard Keeper 2 have been announced yesterday while I have been working on this Game for the last 5 years of my life. Very good timing guys, go ahead. Challenge Accepted. #indie #unity #rpg

The demo is on @itchio : tezateser.itch.io/good-heave… I found some nice demos there in the past. I hope Good Heavens! will be the nice demo discovered for other people now